MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – Google Inc.'s unofficial company motto is "Launch early and iterate." Yet, it appears that someone at Google didn't get the message that this "launch early" philosophy was not to be taken literally with Chrome, a much-ballyhooed Web browser that the tech giant has been developing over the last few years. Early Sept. 1, select technology journalists and software developers in Europe received an e-mail from Google announcing the imminent launch of Chrome, a long-rumored Web browser that would directly compete with Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer.
The announcement, which arrived in the form of a 38-page comic book drawn by acclaimed artist Scott McCloud, was sent out prematurely – a mistake that Google vice president of product management Sundar Pichai acknowledged in an afternoon posting on Google's official blog: "At Google, we have a saying: 'launch early and iterate.' While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well. As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit 'send' a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome." No matter – the Mountain View-based company issued a press release about Chrome and launched it as an open-source beta program the following day.
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Friday, October 3, 2008
Google’s Chrome browser gets impromptu launch
Friday, August 29, 2008
Which is the Best Browser Supporting CSS ?
Today both Netscape and Microsoft have agreed to implement CSS in their respective browsers and this means that Web authors who want to use CSS have to know
which CSS elements they can and can’t use, as well as the significant differencesin the way adopted CSS elements behave in both browsers.
Both use only a subset of the complete specification as laid out by the W3C. Since both companiesare members of the W3C, however, they will adopt the full set of CSS elements over time - at least that is the hope. CSS1 (and CSS2) will only be useful to Web authors if they are widely adopted and fully implemented by browser manufacturers. If they are not, CSS could easily disappear. There is a precedent for this: the official HTML 3.0 specification was widely ignored by browser manufacturers.
The piecemeal way in which Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer have adopted CSS elements is holding CSS back from wider adoption within the Web authoring community. In many cases, CSS elements that are supported in Internet Explorer are not supported in Netscape Navigator, or they are not supported in either browser. Sometimes only certain values of a CSS element are supported, or they only work when associated with certain HTML tags. There are even cases where a CSS element has been adopted for use within a beta (or “preview”) version of a browser and then later dropped in the next beta release - presumably an oversight, but not exactly something to inspire confidence in CSS for a Web author.
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Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Study: Unpatched Web Browsers Prevalent on the Internet
Only 59.1 percent of people use up-to-date, fully patched Web browsers, putting the remainder at risk from growing threats from diligent hackers, according to a new study published by researchers in Switzerland.
The study, published Tuesday, is one of the most comprehensive analysis of what versions of Web browsers people are using on the Internet. The study was conducted by researchers at The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Google and IBM Internet Security Services.
Web browsers are often a weak link in the security chain, as software vulnerabilities can make it easy for hackers to gain control of a PC. When that happens, hackers can perform malicious acts such as stealing personal data or turning PCs into spam-spewing drones.
What the researchers found is that although software vendors provide patches for security problems, it can take days, weeks or months before people update their applications. In the meantime, those users are at risk.
But it's not entirely the fault of users, since Web browser vendors haven't exactly made patching easy, said Stefan Frei, a doctoral student at the institute, which is known as ETH Zurich, and one of the report's authors. The Web browser is still fairly young technology, and the industry has yet to settle on a dominant, well-tested design, he said.
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Sunday, May 18, 2008
Software Notebook: Mozilla striving for an awesome Web browser
That's the question facing Mozilla and the worldwide community of developers responsible for its Firefox browser. The first version, in 2004, took off based on its promise of better security and features such as tabbed browsing, for opening multiple pages inside a window.
With the release of Firefox 3.0 slated for next month, Mozilla's Mike Beltzner thinks they've come up with advances worthy of the same type of attention. He points, as an example, to a Firefox 3.0 feature known officially as the Smart Location Bar -- and informally as the Awesome Bar.
The feature gives the browser's address bar a mechanism for quickly returning to Web pages, without bookmarking them, even if users don't remember the address. As people type, it searches for that text in the addresses and titles of pages that they've visited previously. It also can search "tags" -- keywords that users associate with a particular page.
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